Genesis 16:1-2

"Now Sarai, Abram's wife, bare him no children: and she had a handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, Jehovah hath restrained me from bearing; go in, I pray thee, unto my handmaid; it may be that I shall obtain children from her. And Abram hearkened unto the voice of Sarai."

Well, what was wrong with this? It was a legal and commonly accepted practice after the customs of that age, and we can hardly suppose that Abram and Sarai here deliberately chose to violate God's law. However, there are a number of things wrong:

1. It violated the concept of monogamous marriage, which had been from the beginning.

2. It was a sinful use of a slave girl, who was hardly in a position to deny what was demanded of her, to fulfill the personal desires of Abram and Sarai, and such an inconsiderate use of one's fellow human beings for his own purposes can never be anything but sinful.

3. It was a presumption upon their part that God could not fulfill His promise except through their human devices.

4. This introduction of polygamy was to continue among the patriarchs of Israel with the most far-reaching and undesirable consequences, as in the example of Jacob. Abram and Sarai could not have exhibited a worse example for the subsequent generations of the Chosen People than that visible here.

"Whose name was Hagar ..." We have already noted that she was in all probability acquired in Egypt during Abram's sinful escapade there. The name itself is significant:

"The Arabs claim descent from Abraham through Ishmael and Hagar. Her name, which means "flight," is akin to the word Hegira, used of the flight of Mohammed from Medina to Mecca (622 A.D.), an event from which the Muslims date their era."[1]

This is also a convenient place to note that the extensive posterity of Hagar are the proponents of Islam, and thus the nations that came through Hagar not only proved to be inveterate enemies of the Jews, but of the Christians also. Little could Abram and Sarai have known what a Pandora's box of perpetual troubles for all mankind they opened by the little maneuver recorded here.